Elephant in the room: rogue and fighter dailies.

[nnms]

OK. My knowledge of RQ stops around the 1990 imprints. (I mean, I know Mongoose is publishing it, but I haven't looked at their version beyond the reviews.)

They were publishing it. Now they publish a version of the rules called Legend which is runequest with the runequest filed off. It's actually a nice little set of rules. RuneQuest 6 is coming out later this year, hopefully in the next couple months or so. It's the same designers that did MRQ/Legend, but published through another company and with more dials and knobs when it comes to the strange magic systems that RQ has.

And I've also seen these different approaches cause arguments to break out on the old ICE message boards.

As you can see from this thread, people like to fight on the internet.

That sounds like hard work. Is it OK to ask why? Was there something about 4e that was more appealing than the classic RQ-ish games themselves?

I was playing 4E and running it a lot. But I was missing an approach to gaming that I didn't really connect with RuneQuest at the time. One person I wanted involved in the game told me they didn't want to learn a new system, so that was part of it. So I started snipping and cutting and replacing. It still looked a lot like 4E, but it had a pretty massive change in terms of how resources were refreshed. We played a few sessions, had a blast, but the group wanted to get back to the main campaign (we didn't convert the main campaign over because some players new it was probably going to be deadlier and base 4E is pretty easy not to die in).

The biggest thing warning flag for me in the playtest is that there is not the least hint of an approach to play where "winning" isn't crucial - or, to put it a bit less crudely, where the stakes are multi-dimensionsal. On page 3 of the DM Guidelines they seem to assume the exact opposite - that stakes are single-dimensionsal - when they talk about encouraging creativity and engaging the fiction by making those sorts of solutions the easiest way to succeed.

Yeah. I'm not sure what to think about that. I guess at its core, D&D started off as being about going into a dangerous place, surviving and coming out with gold and glory.

Part of the attractiveness of games like RQ and RM - at least in my experience - is that they encourage a type of detail in character building that then comes to be reflected in the setting and situation, so there are often multiple viable approaches (social isn't obviously inferior to combat, for example) and situations are less likely to be obviously zero-sum in relation both to means and to ends.

There's also a ton of world building that goes on in character creation. Also, the reward cycle has nothing to do with "winning" in RQ. Whatever the results, you have your improvement rolls on the things you did. You don't need to get XP by killing monsters. And with wounds taking people out of the fight often more than outright killing, NPCs can stick around a bit more.

Skill challenges and similar sorts of meta-gamey conflict resolution mechanics are a completely different way to achieve non-single-dimensionality. ... Because of the metagame element to this sort of action resolution, the GM can introduce a complication in a different dimension.

Running skill challenges in a less binary way is one of the factors that led me back to wanting emergent play. While I like the idea of stake setting and meta elements to failures and successes, I found the best skill challenges where the ones where we essentially resorted back to describe-react-redescribe circuit play. As long as everyone keeps describing things that actually pursue a given goal, you can get there without much of a fuss.

Another way I used them was that I overtly gave players stake setting power. Where they could state literally any goal and go after it and then we'd start. But even then, it became an issue of the narration during the skill challenge not really mattering nearly as much as the die rolls and the final binary outcome.

I think meta level declarations on success or failure like you are doing work better than a binary approach.

Whereas when I look at the playtest I see PCs who are narrow in their detail, suggesting a narrow setting and narrow points of engagement with situation, and GM advice that is similarly narrow and single-dimensioned in its focus.

Kill monsters and take their stuff. In my Basic D&D game, we're only in the caves to get rich, to make a name for ourselves and to rid the countryside of monsters. I have fond dreams of a another dimension of play (my character's knighting and entry into politics) but that's not going to happen.

I like how the playtest module talks about various ways of getting people interested in going to the caves as if that matters. The playtest and the module are both about exploring some caves, killing some monsters and getting some loot. People may talk about how KotBL is actually about turning various monster factions against one another, negotiation, etc., but all that is still done just to make some monsters die and line the pockets of the PCs with gold. And there really is nothing in the rules of either Basic D&D or the playtest to hang that sort of stuff on anyway.

The medusa could be a great encounter, but I don't see the GM advice or the tools - whether on the PC sheets, or in the action resolution mechanics and guidelines - to make it happen.

I guess they're hoping it'll turn out good by accident.

And if the answer is "well, that sort of stuff is going to come in the modules", where exactly are these going to be bolted on?

I don't think that stuff is really going to come at all.

I really am beginning to think that they are relying on the playtesters to create the modularity for them. That commonly talked about house rules on their forums and through other feed back channels will be taken, cleaned up and made into the modules. I don't think the design team is actually going to think about different dials and settings and take the time to write modules any time soon.

I think 5E is basically going to be a stripped down 3.x with a buffet table of house rules passed off as modularity designed to produce specific play types.

So why would they create a nice metaresource based resolution system to produce multidemensional complications? It's not like your use of skill challenges to do that was widely spread among 4E players. Is it even on the design team's radar? I think they've been spending too much time playing AD&D to think more about possible skill challenge uses.

 

[Campbell]

I've seen you say this a couple of times recently, and I think that you are correct.

That's why, in a recent post (maybe in this thread?) I listed three metagame/fortune-in-the-middle mechanics in classic D&D, from least to most: attack rolls (especially in the AD&D context of a 1 minute round and some unspecified amount of parrying and feinting until one (and exactly one) opportunity presents itself); saving throws; and hit points.

More and more I'm convinced that the power of D&D lies in its abstractions. There's something powerful and almost primal in the quirks of D&D hit points and saves that gets lost in post AD&D games which make them function radically different in play. The abstractions inherent in the game operate optimally when when one does not bring the microscope up too closely. You're left with a more flexible game of dungeon exploration/monster murder that way.

Where I think 3e (and to a lesser extent 2e) falters is that it is D&D that takes itself too seriously. It extends the metaphor of a number of abstractions to the point where we're forced to look at things too closely. Additions like touch AC, the rejiggering of saves to serve simulation, overly specific combat maneuvers and extending the metaphor of leveling to include mundane skills push the game's abstractions to your face to the point where we stop seeing abstractions as abstractions and instead view them as objective reality. This creates a simulation about nothing that I find incredibly unsatisfying and wholly unlike AD&D. Of course for people who already viewed AD&D in a highly simulative light or wanted a bit more RM style sim this is satisfactory as long as one didn't look too hard at what they were actually simulating or didn't mind things like the trip attack fighter who trips someone on nearly every turn. I'm certainly biased - 3e is by far my least favorite edition.

4e is in many ways 3e's opposite. Instead of extending the metaphors of the game's metaphors, it embraces the power of the game's abstractions and layers more abstractions on top of it, creating the possibility for using the game for vanilla narrativist play. However, the level of abstraction in the game becomes so strong that the dungeon exploration the game was founded on becomes almost impossible to play out in 4eC. The need to step outside of the character is too jarring for a good contingent to deal with. My experience with 4e is that it functions best for groups who had long ago left the typical D&D core story behind for more heroic/mythic tropes.

I believe the best course going forward is to return to AD&D's level of abstraction as the game's default for the most part. As the RPG world's big tent the default style of play needs to be palatable to a variety of people in a way that 3e and 4e's extremes are not. Of course I might just be playing too much AD&D lately.

 

[nnms]

nnms can correct me if I'm wrong, but I took the comment to be this: that as soon as you have a resource that a player can choose to spend (like a stamina point), then even if mechanically it is defined in simulationist, ingame terms, there is no easy way to stop players metagaming it.

Yeah. As soon as you have a resource like that, even if it's supposed to represent a character's stamina in the fiction, a player can spend them in a flurry or hold off to manage spot light time (or a variety of other purposes).

And these are the cracks into which players can wedge their metagame agendas.

When you're not playing a simulation/description-circuit based approach, metagaming is good. Awesome really.

RQ is very austere in comparison.

As is fitting a game that is set in a fantasy version of the dark ages as a default. All you can do is describe what you do. And have a short brutal life as a Pict tribesman as the Scots invade to turn Pictland into Scotland.

In my RQ game, disease is literally caused by angry spirits. And the rules support me in it so well. I love that even the dark ages world view gets supported in the rules. And there's no meta resource to appeal to. Best find a shaman or a priest and get that spirit exorcised!

 

[pemerton]

First, I just wanted to say that this has turned into an awesome thread. So thanks to all the posters over the past few pages.

Second, some replies.

There's also a ton of world building that goes on in character creation. Also, the reward cycle has nothing to do with "winning" in RQ.

Thee are good points about RQ. They are less true in RM than RQ, but RM is closer to RQ than classic D&D is. (Do you, or does anyone else, know about Chivalry & Sorcery in this respect? I've got rulebooks for the 3rd and 4th editions, but have never read them all the way through and don't know a lot about it.)

As is fitting a game that is set in a fantasy version of the dark ages as a default. All you can do is describe what you do. And have a short brutal life as a Pict tribesman as the Scots invade to turn Pictland into Scotland.

In my RQ game, disease is literally caused by angry spirits. And the rules support me in it so well. I love that even the dark ages world view gets supported in the rules. And there's no meta resource to appeal to. Best find a shaman or a priest and get that spirit exorcised!

My RQ experiences have been with one-offs or short scenarios rather than campaigns. But there's no doubt that there's a lot to like about it! And even though I haven't played or GMed it for a long time, I like to (re-)read the rulebooks for ideas about how to handle things - like the spirit stuff you talk about, for instance.

I recently did a resurrection scene in my 4e game, and the way I handled the role of the gods and the priests I'm pretty sure was influenced by thinking about how RQ handles shamans and priests. (I've never really understood sorcerery in RQ - either the rules or the fiction.)

More and more I'm convinced that the power of D&D lies in its abstractions.

<snip>

Where I think 3e (and to a lesser extent 2e) falters is that it is D&D that takes itself too seriously. It extends the metaphor of a number of abstractions to the point where we're forced to look at things too closely.

<snip>

3e is by far my least favorite edition.

4e is in many ways 3e's opposite. Instead of extending the metaphors of the game's metaphors, it embraces the power of the game's abstractions and layers more abstractions on top of it, creating the possibility for using the game for vanilla narrativist play. However, the level of abstraction in the game becomes so strong that the dungeon exploration the game was founded on becomes almost impossible to play out in 4eC.

<snip>

My experience with 4e is that it functions best for groups who had long ago left the typical D&D core story behind for more heroic/mythic tropes.

I agree that 4e doesn't really suit dungeon exploration. All the minutiae that dungeon exploration relies on, 4e does away with! (Thank heavens, in my view!)

And I think your last sentence probably describes my group pretty well.

I played only a tiny bit of 3E - I find it an unsatisfactory mix of gonzo and gritty. I played quite a bit of 2nd ed AD&D, and my main issue with that edition would be that the fiction promised something that the mechanics don't really deliver (I guess I'm a pretty orthodox Forge-ist in having that view - and I think it explains the tendency towards railroading that I see in 2nd ed modules).

I think your point about 3E being too serious in a certain sort of way is an interesting one. My feeling is that the playtest is going to produce pressure on D&Dnext to head in that sort of direction, though. (Because I don't get the vibe that PF reduces this sort of seriousness, and presumably recapturing some of that market is part of the plan.)

I guess at its core, D&D started off as being about going into a dangerous place, surviving and coming out with gold and glory.

<snip>

Kill monsters and take their stuff. In my Basic D&D game, we're only in the caves to get rich, to make a name for ourselves and to rid the countryside of monsters. I have fond dreams of a another dimension of play (my character's knighting and entry into politics) but that's not going to happen.

<snip>

The playtest and the module are both about exploring some caves, killing some monsters and getting some loot. People may talk about how KotBL is actually about turning various monster factions against one another, negotiation, etc., but all that is still done just to make some monsters die and line the pockets of the PCs with gold.

It's been a fair while since I've played that sort of D&D.
Which probably comes across as a snide criticism, but isn't meant to be. But my approach to the game was really shaped by Oriental Adventures (the original TSR version), which was all about PCs located in a rich setting with motivations going beyond the mere young Conan-esque.

It would be odd if the unity edition was too narrow to satisfactorily encompass Oriental Adventures, or Dragonlance!

I found the best skill challenges where the ones where we essentially resorted back to describe-react-redescribe circuit play. As long as everyone keeps describing things that actually pursue a given goal, you can get there without much of a fuss.

Another way I used them was that I overtly gave players stake setting power.

My approach is similar to your describe-react-redescribe circuit, but with the redescriptions (by me as GM) heavily metagamed - as in I don't just extrapolate from the existing state of the fiction, but inject complications/pressures that will play on what I know to be the players' concerns/motivations. The biggest influence on my approach, I think, is the advice on running extended contests in Maelstrom Storytelling, and the discussion of Intent and Task in the Burning Wheel books.

I have used player stake setting, but not fully overtly - more implicitly, and heavily tied to the pre-established fiction. (As in, the pre-established fiction makes the stakes plausible in an intuitive, pre-action-resolution-mechanics-coming-into-play fashion.)

I don't think that stuff is really going to come at all.

I really am beginning to think that they are relying on the playtesters to create the modularity for them.

<snip>

I think 5E is basically going to be a stripped down 3.x with a buffet table of house rules passed off as modularity designed to produce specific play types.

An interesting set of predictions.

You may be right. At this stage I'm not sure at all what's going on. There is obviously a very heavy marketing dimension to the playtest, but what is their strategy for retaining the 4e market in the meantime? Maybe that there is nowhere else that most of those players will go?

Glad I'm not Mike Mearls! He's got a hard job to pull off.

 

[nnms]

Thee are good points about RQ. They are less true in RM than RQ, but RM is closer to RQ than classic D&D is. (Do you, or does anyone else, know about Chivalry & Sorcery in this respect? I've got rulebooks for the 3rd and 4th editions, but have never read them all the way through and don't know a lot about it.)

My only memory of C&S was of constantly looking things up in the rulebook. I remember it being very, very rules dense with different rules for all sorts of situations and not much in the way of using one mechanic to resolve multiple situations. Can't comment about metaresources or any connections to the world produced during character creation.

My RQ experiences have been with one-offs or short scenarios rather than campaigns. But there's no doubt that there's a lot to like about it! And even though I haven't played or GMed it for a long time, I like to (re-)read the rulebooks for ideas about how to handle things - like the spirit stuff you talk about, for instance.

You should be able to find an SRD of Mongoose RQ with a google search. You may spot a bolted on meta mechanic or two. Like Hero Points which let you cheat death and the like.

The spirit stuff is pretty much a result of spirit summoning and spirit combat being something you can have a character be able to do right away. And the statted out spirits of different things (madness, disease, etc.,). I remember one session where a shaman PC tried to help a possessed girl and ended up losing the spiritual battle and being possessed himself.

I recently did a resurrection scene in my 4e game, and the way I handled the role of the gods and the priests I'm pretty sure was influenced by thinking about how RQ handles shamans and priests. (I've never really understood sorcerery in RQ - either the rules or the fiction.)

The whole relationship with the god/religion thing is pretty cool. As is the ability to collect and bind spirits for the Shaman.

The sorcerer is based on a mish mash of medieval occultism, kabbalistic high magic, gnosticism and mystical schools like the hermetics and the neoplatonists. But it eventually comes down to learning spells, modifying them for effect and paying magic points to cast them. But it's all linked to secret lodges, orders and the like. Well, sort of. Theoretically an independant witch or alchemist can have sorcery without the trappings of a larger fraternity. RQ6 apparently will take these different ideas and develop them more separately.

It would be odd if the unity edition was too narrow to satisfactorily encompass Oriental Adventures, or Dragonlance!

I hear an awful lot of AD&D1E talk, and 3.x talk. And maybe some basic talk. But I'm hearing very little from WotC that they're looking at 2E in any meaningful way. Perhaps with good reason, as it was the version in print when TSR went away.

The game needs something to give you the type of play 2E promised but failed to deliver on. Something that would make OA, Dragonlance or Birthright truly sing.

Well. Burning Wheel already does that, so even if the unity edition of D&D can't, we still have good options.

An interesting set of predictions.

You may be right. At this stage I'm not sure at all what's going on. There is obviously a very heavy marketing dimension to the playtest, but what is their strategy for retaining the 4e market in the meantime? Maybe that there is nowhere else that most of those players will go?

Glad I'm not Mike Mearls! He's got a hard job to pull off.

I'm beginning to see merit in the prediction that 5E may be the last published edition of Dungeons & Dragons.

Looking back through decades of Runequest stuff over the last few weeks has really brought something to the light for me.

When other games have a new edition, the changes are not massive or sweeping. It's very rarely a complete scrapping and starting over like 3.x, 4E were and 5E is shaping up to be. Games like Rolemaster & Runequest may have never dominated the market and they have popped in and out of wide distribution, but they still offer pretty consistent play edition after edition. Call of Cthulhu is another great example of this. As is Tunnels & Trolls (even if it is only currently published in French) and Traveler.

The TSR era versions of D&D are a lot like this as well. OD&D, B/X/BECMI & AD&D are more similar than they are different.

I wonder why WotC just keeps on scrapping and rebuilding? Sticking with one and building on it worked for Paizo.

 

[Campbell]

I agree that 4e doesn't really suit dungeon exploration. All the minutiae that dungeon exploration relies on, 4e does away with! (Thank heavens, in my view!)

And I think your last sentence probably describes my group pretty well.

I played only a tiny bit of 3E - I find it an unsatisfactory mix of gonzo and gritty. I played quite a bit of 2nd ed AD&D, and my main issue with that edition would be that the fiction promised something that the mechanics don't really deliver (I guess I'm a pretty orthodox Forge-ist in having that view - and I think it explains the tendency towards railroading that I see in 2nd ed modules).

I'm guessing we followed a pretty similar path, albeit in my case it probably had more to do with growing up having been fed a steady diet of heroic fiction in various forms prior to having started playing D&D. Rand Al'thor, the Heroes of Greek Mythology, Luke Skywalker, Chrono, Link from Zelda, Peter Parker, the Fellowship of the Ring, and the X-Men were the heroes of my youth. I didn't develop a taste for Swords and Sorcery fiction until much later.

I also agree that 2e is an incredibly incoherent game. It throws AD&D in your face and then promptly instructs you to not play AD&D. When I play it these days I ignore that advice. I consider it to be a poor man's 1e.

I think your point about 3E being too serious in a certain sort of way is an interesting one. My feeling is that the playtest is going to produce pressure on D&Dnext to head in that sort of direction, though. (Because I don't get the vibe that PF reduces this sort of seriousness, and presumably recapturing some of that market is part of the plan.)

You're pretty much spot on in your observations here and managed to strike on my biggest fear for 5e. Pathfinder strikes me as a game that embraces the worst parts of 3e. It takes itself entirely too seriously, values setting over a game that works, and embraces over codification.

I hope WotC realizes that going too far down that path will result in a game that their other constituents will find vastly unpalatable. So far it looks good, although spell slot numbers seem higher than I'd like.

 

[Hussar]

I wasn't looking for posts by you, but here are two that I came across.

You railed against clerics and fire and forget, and said that was your biggest hang-up against Vancian magic for them - http://www.enworld.org/forum/5774065-post108.html

And said here - http://www.enworld.org/forum/5774474-post114.html - that your real problem with Vancian magic was the fire-and-forget of wizards.
/snip

You would characterize those posts as "railing"? Really? Bud, I have no problem railing. Honest. Heck, swim a bit upthread and I went off the ranch with NNMS (Sorry about that btw, my bad. Been a HELLISH week at work) if you want an example of railing.

That? That was a pretty even handed criticism if I do say so myself. Yeah, I'll stand by what I said before. My biggest issue with F&F Vancian magic is balance issues.

 

[pemerton]

I'm guessing we followed a pretty similar path, albeit in my case it probably had more to do with growing up having been fed a steady diet of heroic fiction in various forms prior to having started playing D&D. Rand Al'thor, the Heroes of Greek Mythology, Luke Skywalker, Chrono, Link from Zelda, Peter Parker, the Fellowship of the Ring, and the X-Men were the heroes of my youth. I didn't develop a taste for Swords and Sorcery fiction until much later.

The X-Men - especially the Chris Claremont X-Men - is maybe the single biggest influence on my approach to situation as a GM. Group dynamics, convoluted backstories that drag the PCs (and players) in, more and more emerging over time as the PCs become more competent and more invested in the setting.

A big tick to LotR, Star Wars and Spider Man also. For me, also John Boorman's Excalibur, and Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea.

Until the last 5 to 10 years, sword and sorcery for me was Roy Thomas's Conan. I now have some REH on my shelf, and don't mind it to read, but I can't say it's a big influence on my game.

Out of curiosity (and if you already talked about this upthread, apologies for losing track of your posts), did you move from D&D to a more simulationist (RQ, RM etc) system?

Pathfinder strikes me as a game that embraces the worst parts of 3e. It takes itself entirely too seriously, values setting over a game that works, and embraces over codification.

That's my impression too, though admittedly based on only the most cursory investigation.

So far it looks good, although spell slot numbers seem higher than I'd like.

I'm glad it's looking good for you. I was thinking about backgrounds and setting, and thinking that some of [MENTION=386]LostSoul[/MENTION]'s ideas about skills that he uses in his hack could be incorporated to use in backgrounds that would be more interesting than the ones in the playtest (eg instead of "Lore +3" you might have "Student of the Spiral Tower +3", which would bring setting into play as a direct input into action resolution).

What underwhelmed me about the playtest was the action resolution mechanics - especially the lack of mechanics for the 2nd and 3rd pillars.

 

[Herschel]

Yeah....Justin Alexander is really good at taking a big, smelly, passive-aggressive asparagus piss on people who are having fun doing things he doesn't like. He even managed to wrap his trolling up in a very convincing shroud of rhetoric. Make no mistake though, the ONLY reason the whole dissociated mechanics idea came around was so people would have a superficially reasonable argument when claiming that 4E players aren't really "role-playing" when their Fighter uses a daily power.

Dissociated mechanics is a b.s. metric to judge roleplaying on and here's why:

1) What constitutes "role-playing" has never had a unanimously agreed upon definition. Some people think that games like Fiasco don't count because they don't have GM's. But whatever...let's pretend that it's solely down to interacting with the game world through the eyes on one's character...that brings us to:

2) Every role-playing game game out there has dissociated mechanics somewhere. Every. Single. One. At least some level of abstraction is necessary for a game to function on a level where it can actually be played and enjoyed by people who aren't robots.

WEG Star Wars had drama points. Spirit of the Century has fate points. Say...does a madman know how many insanity points he has? What keeps a shadowrun character from taking so many cyberware enhancements that they lose all of their essence? Do they have am essence gauge on their person? And in D&D...how is it that the fighter always knows approximately how approximately how many axe blows to the face (s)he can take before dying?

What's more...I'm not a board game guy, but I'm willing to bet that someone out there can name at least one that is less dissociated than an AD&D.

3) But I guess it's all about immersion, right? Because most of our gaming sessions are poignant works of impromptu theater and salient works of true artistic merit, rather than a table full of grown men making dick and fart jokes in monty python voices. I defy someone to post an audio recording of a play session for ANY game that doesn't eventually wind up sounding like an order of the stick comic. I DEFY them.

But let's go back to the first point about role playing. We might not know exactly how to define it, but we now what the end goal is: Immersion. If someone feels immersed while playing a game, even a while spending a healing surge or something, are they not actually roleplaying then, despite the feeling of immersion? Are they wrong for being immersed in the game? Were they actually NOT immersed in the game? If so, can you prove what was really going on in their heads?

4)It's a silly game where players pretend to be magical elves. The Alexandrian is a skilled bull crap artist, which makes his bullying somehow look urbane rather than petty and childish, but in essence he's trying to quantify rpg mechanics in an almost academic manner, while the rest of us are sitting around a table and trying to make our friends shoot mountain dew out of their noses.

So...daily martial powers in 4E. Exactly like an amazing touchdown, or a grand slam, or a triple double, or a critical hit for that matter. There is NO real difference.

Pseudo-XP and quoted for awesome.

 

[Bobbum Man]

And then you go and do the same thing in this post.

I'm sorry that your sessions are just an endless barrage of dick jokes and the like. Try going for higher standards.

EDIT: Check out some actual play podcasts and you'll find people can easily increase the quality of their play and not make a ton of stupid jokes and acting immature.

Why be sorry? I'm not.

Going for "higher standards" in a silly pretendical magicky elfgame is like trying to find love at a downtown porn arcade.

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but even your own games aren't as deep and meaningful as you think they are.

But if you can point me in the direction of an actual play podcast that doesn't dissolve into a table full of people reciting rules and numbers at one another, then I'd be happy to be proven wrong. You know...since I'm not playing D&D right.

No, not at all. What he did was figure out one important reason why certain people don't like certain games and express it clearly.

This was pretty valuable for me personally. I knew I didn't like 4E, but his writing helped me figure out why I didn't like it.

I really don't like dissociated mechanics in general. I'll put up with them if there's a really good reason to do so (e.g. hit points), but when writing a rule I'll always try to find something related to in-game fiction or character knowledge first.

No...what happened is that JA didn't like 4E, and it bothered him that other people did. So he turned his not inconsiderable intellect toward crafting a spurious argument that he and others could throw at people to make them feel bad for liking what he doesn't like.

As I pointed out earlier, meta-game rules aren't a 4E thing, they're a roleplaying game thing. Trying to pretend that 4E is less of a roleplaying game because of them is silly. Also, people have pointed out time and again how many of these rules in 4E DO have in game analogs but they are rejected time and again, despite the fact that these things obviously make perfect sense to people the people who play it. Would healing surges still be considered "dissociative" if they were called something like "stamina" or "vitality"?

Yeah...so the whole "dissociative mechanics" argument is a smoke screen for: "stop liking what I don't like!"